Review: Crisp writing drives Terror of Living

The title of Urban Waite’s debut, The Terror of Living, is the only clunker in an otherwise superbly written chase novel set in Washington State.

Phil Hunt is a stoical ex-con who, with his wife, scrapes a living out of a horse farm, their income occasionally supplemented by a longtime smuggling gig. When recently married deputy Bobby Drake stumbles on Hunt’s horseback retrieval of a drug drop in the Cascade Mountains, the crackling action takes over. Drake’s father, a onetime sheriff, is in prison for his own smuggling sideline.

The inevitable complications come as the drug suppliers force Hunt into another operation to pay off their losses, an exchange made on a boat in Puget Sound. He doesn’t know they have hired a psycho-killer to recover the goods and eliminate him, a loose end now that Drake and the DEA are on his trail.

A cat-and-mouse pursuit, gut-clenching violence (fair warning, the book cannot make the claim, “no horses were harmed in the making of this story”), loyalties sundered — all come with the genre. What is rarer is the finely honed literary sensibility of the writer, who conveys the sensory reality of his settings with evocative exactitude. Sometimes in the opening scenes, the heightened language gets in its own way, but Waite’s considerable talent in general serves him well.

While the description looks effortless, the writer labors a bit to plumb the psyches of Hunt and Drake, which isn’t entirely needed. Both have principled cores that become evident without much prompting, not least in how they relate to their wives.